Since September 11 contemporary humanity has been flung into one of its most perilous historic chapters. The most ruinous circles within capitalism grew in the space created by these events and the most rabid trends in its ranks have taken centre stage in world politics. In the turbulent months since September these circles have embarked on an adventurous revision of official policies to satisfying an unquenchable appetite for more profit and to squeeze excess labour exponentially [1]. The political structure of our world is in the process of undergoing major surgery.
The present state of the world is the result of a rare, perhaps unique, historic conjuncture. A number of important developments simultaneously criss-crossed one another: Severe economic earthquakes shook some of the main capitalist countries [2]. The leadership of the institutions of global economy face a crisis of legitimacy [3]. The labour camp is increasingly resisting the project of global spread of neo-liberalism [4]. In the US presidential elections the explicit agents of the oil and military industrial segments of the economy come to power. Finally terrorists attacked the world trade centre and military control centre of the world’s only super power. Out of these historic conjunctures two interlinking processes with an enormous ruinous potential emerged.
The first development is the formation of a new system of global political command. Compared to what had been operating in the preceding decades the new structure is entirely different in the way it organised and operated and also in its sphere of operation. It is to be different from the Security Council, Nato, G8, and other such clubs. This is a new apparatus with a condensed structure and rapid response and decision making ability. This ensures its control in an authoritarian way over all the orbits of production and exchange and all the major domains of the reproduction of capital. Also whenever and wherever necessary it could ignore the sovereignty of nation states, charters, and international treaties and agreements.
Even if the major capitalist powers accept the need to forge a new system of global government, it does not necessarily mean they agree to its inner make-up. The hierarchy of power and internal workings of this system is a major source of friction and rivalry. This dispute began even before the dust had settled on the world trade centre.
George W Bush sought to use US military and economic superiority to in practice impose the undisputed political domination of that country on the world, and to restructure the global command system along these lines. He was competing George Bush senior’s agenda for founding a “new world order”. His was a concerted effort to modify the global legal and institutional framework to correspond to the true balance of power in the world at the close of the cold war.
A centralised structure of dominion around US military and economic power permits American capital to extend its domain of influence and control throughout the world and in this way fulfil two different tasks simultaneously. On the one hand it removes the barriers on global corporationism and globalise the exploitation model linked to it. On the other hand it creates a political-security arm for US transnational corporations, thus strengthening them in the race for global control vis a vis their rivals. In short while “globalising” American capital it “Americanises” the globe.
Deepening a trend
For this reason the White House elite, in the name of “fighting terrorism”, rooted their plans and efforts on “US national interests”. This trend was noticeable in the Bush cabinet even before September 11, though in a more dilute form. Bush had already taken a unilateralist position on many global agreements. In under two years the US had refused to sign the treaty banning an expansion of biological weapons, did not participate in the Organisation of Co-operation and Development meeting in Paris, and in practice invalidated all attempts to break up the machinery for money laundering and tax havens. In March 2001 George W Bush declared the Kyoto accord on limiting greenhouse gasses dead, because “we will do nothing that might harm the US economy”, even though the US is responsible for 36% of such emissions [5]. The US unilaterally abrogated the treaty limiting intercontinental ballistic missiles, and refused to ratify the treaty banning nuclear tests completely (which had been signed by 164 nations). It rejected the anti landmine treaty organised in Ottawa and signed by 122 nations. The US was the only country to oppose the illegal international movement of small arms in July 2001 and also rejected the scheme for setting up an international criminal court [6].
After September 11 the policy of priotizing “national interest” and of isolationism took on a new life. The escalation is exemplified in the 30% tariff the US placed on most steel imports. The message was clear. An unrestricted global market and free trade is conditional on the competitive ability of US capital and on their interests. EU Commissioner on Trade Pascal Lamy’s response to these restrictions and the likely damage to European steel producers was illuminating: “the world steel market is not the wild west, where people can do as they like. There are rules to guarantee the multilateral system” [7]. The Wall Street Journal confirmed the unprecedented nature of this decision by calling it the “perhaps the most dramatic protectionist step of any president in decades”. [8].
European criticism of Washington’s policies, and in particular after Bush’s unexpected “evil axis” speech, prompted Richard Pearl, security adviser to the US president, to speak bluntly at the world security conference in Munich last February [Note: reference 9 is to an article in January!!]: “the US does not prioritise the need to attract the support of its friends. Never has the US been so keen to act alone where necessary. I assure you that if it is necessary to chose between defending ourselves against terrorism and a long list of friends and allies, we will chose to support ourselves against terrorism” [9].
The Guardian quotes an EU source that for the Bush administration the “defence of national interest” will not be limited to unilateral acts or arbitrary interference. It will also be accompanied by authoritarian behaviour towards “friends” and “allies”. He protested that “It is humiliating for us to go to Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice to give us homework. We must not think that the only policies allowed are those the US has not vetoed”. [10]
The Bush cabinet portrays the imperious political stance and isolationist economic policies as prioritising US “national interests”. Yet these measures rather than reflecting the “general interest” of American capital indeed gets their inspiration from the “particular interests” of the military-industrial sectors and the oil and energy corporations of that country.
A glance at the main faces in the Bush cabinet reveals how direct and extensive the links are with the oil companies and the military-industrial complex, [11] and whose interests are being served in their effort to preside over the global political structure by restructuring it. Here too is revealed the true substance of this domination. It is not without cause that in the projects for the restructuring of global political order, Washington’s global oil strategy, and countries with large oil and gas deposits take centre stage. Why else would Central Asia and the Caspian oil reserves, with known reserves of 4 trillion barrels [??it says dollars in the article] have such a key place in the foreign policy decisions of the US [12].
The relationship of oil and arms is irrefutable. Like all natural resource that cannot be produced in a factory, oil can only be turned into a source of rising profit when it is possible to cut the contribution of ground rent (right of ownership) in its price. When neither demand can be controlled nor production increased beyond a certain level (i.e. when economic controls are less effective - as they seem to be in the last few years - or indeed have gone into reverse) then the only route left open is to take possession of the source and deny others the right to ownership. In short to use naked force and resort to military power and ultimately political control or occupation. And this is precisely the second development in evidence since the events of September 11.
To start a war is not a new phenomenon. The history of capitalism, like previous class societies is full of ruinous wars, large and small. Since the second world war the use of military means to sort out international affairs has been a daily affair. During this period the US alone has attacked 18 counties without declaring war [13].
Since the Cold War came to an end the military, alongside the economic and ideological fronts, had has been an important weapon for pushing forward the neo-liberal globalisation project. The images of the Gulf and Balkan wars are still fresh. However, what is unfolding today is a different role for war and military interventions in the global restructuring of capitalism.
The fundamental difference is that military power has been given pivotal role in international interventions. The Bush administration, pays lip service to the “invisible hand” of the market, but chooses war as the main method to realise “national interests” and to spread US economic hegemony. Bombing, weapons of mass destruction, and military conquest replace financial or credit squeezes and economic sanctions. With the looming crisis in the world economy and the taking shape of increasing divisions in the camp of capital, the resort to arms must appear more reassuring. Not least because the undisputed superiority of the US in this arena will dispel any doubts about its leadership role. [14]. Richard Pearl is again remarkably frank: “we are not after clever diplomacy in confronting our enemies. We will go straight to war, a total war, a war in which there are no stages”. [15]
In following this line, the US administration declared a “global war” on terrorism. Yet the descriptions of this war are totally different from what has been hitherto understood as war. This is a war without a defined enemy, without fixed allies and friends, without any time limit, without any clear declared aims. According to Dick Cheney “The US plans to use military force against 40 or 50 countries” in a war that may last 50 years. [16]
The more we are distanced from September 11, the less the White House officials limit the targets of military intervention to the campaign against terrorism. Even though at the onset a vague, and flexible, definition of terrorism justified attacks on any country, the declaration of war against half the world’s population and military intervention from Columbia to the Philippines needed more varied “just” reasons to hang warmongering propaganda on. We are now presented with excuses such as this or that country has plans for possessing weapons of mass destruction, or for manufacturing long range missiles, or tramples on the human rights of its citizens, or even has not been elected by its own people and such like to justify military action.
In this new global war, the friends of the USA are also not immutable. “The Bush cabinet has decided not to have a single alliance. Instead it will look to forming different alliances for different missions” is how Paul Wolfowitz put it. [17]
Nor are there any set limits in choosing targets, methods or weapons - no limits on the US military machine. Donald Rumsfeld called on workers in the Pentagon to “think the unthinkable” [18]. New weapons were indeed tested in Afghanistan. [19]
The rules relating to prisoners of war are brazenly flouted. Prisoners of war are chained in cages in the “X-ray” camp in Guantenamo. Protection of non-combatants no longer worry policy makers. One can ignore “public opinion” and bomb kindergartens, hospitals or even Red Cross centres. Women and children scratching the mountainside for a root to fill their hungry stomachs are fair game for shells and mortars. People living in enemy land are “un-people”.
Misinformation is another weapon in the 50-year war. It is now official policy and surfaces in a new defence department section “Centre of Strategic Influence”. Thanks to the atmosphere of war and exceptional circumstances, democracy, and with it openness based on informing the public, is officially cancelled.
To resort to war and police and military repression is not a threat. It is a real plan being unfolding under our very eyes. The US is about to create the largest military machine in human history by increasing its military budget by $48 billion to 379 [is it not $331 bn??] billion dollars. These exclude separate budgets for making weapons of mass destruction and military exploits and occupation of other countries, which have separate budgets. According to Paul Kennedy, author of the Rise and Fall of Great Powers and professor of history in Yale, the military budget in the US is equal to the next nine most militarised states put together [20] and his budget is equivalent to 40% of the world’s total military expenditure. [21]
There has also been an expansion of US military bases since September 11. Pentagon sources have announced that the US military net has been extended in 13 places in 9 countries around Afghanistan. There are bases in Pakistan, Kirgizstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Bulgaria, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAR and Saudi Arabia – with over 90,000 military personnel. [22]
Never before has so much been laid aside for arming and arms manufacture, and with such urgency. Projects follow one after another to produce new weapons. Just one element is a historic 200 billion dollars order with Lockheed Martin – which boosted Lockheed share overnight by 30%. [23]
What future is the world being promised? What is the face of the “new order” that the powerful of this world are promising to build?
The blueprints for “a new order” has the immediate aim of creating a political and security apparatus whose role can be summerised as: removing any existing and potential obstacle (crises, resistance, protests) blocking the road to globalisation of capital. And to harness its contradictions, and crises that prejudice the extensive reproduction of capital and extraction of surplus value on a global scale. With these assumptions the future of our world will be no different from its past, only darker, more unbearable and degrading.
The project that the “permanent war” has the mission of imposing on all the countries of the world is in no fundamental way different form that which was imposed on Argentina over the last 20 years. The total clearing away of social government, the sale of all state owned institutions and companies and their so called privatisation, removing restrictions on the financial system, freeing trade, globalisation of unregulated jobs and unregulated wages and with it removal of job and social security, de-organisation of the labour market and with it removing the ability to wage collective struggle by the labour force against capital.
Argentina was one of the first countries where the neo-liberal project was unfolded. Its executors were all excellent students of the World Bank (one even got a Noble prize for economics 3 years ago). Argentina removed trade barriers, radically liberalised the fiscal policy of the country, pegged the peso to the dollar; allowed 70% of all the nationalised banks, institutions and companies to be taken over by transnational capital. The country became so “globalised” that of its national sovereignty only the flag remained. [24]
The net gain of “restructuring” was total bankruptcy: 2.5 million out of work, 15 million of the 36 million population below the poverty line, with 5 million in absolute poverty (meaning hungry). All the wealth and public utilities are in the hands of the Citibanks and Chevrons and Enrons of this world. And to top it all is a 132 billion US dollars debt. All this occurred in a country that was once the beard basket of the world. It had everything: water, oil, wheat, meat, and huge tracts of land. It was ninth in the world GPD league. What the transnational capital achieved only a nuclear bomb could emulate. Argentina is that social future that the 50-year war is supposed to unfold throughout our planet. [25]
To get a glimpse of the blue print for the political future one need go no further than to look at the face of two governments today spanning the two ends of the spectrum of global domination: The US government and Afghanistan.
The Enron bankruptcy, the largest in the history of capitalism, shed light on the workings of the US administration. We became acquainted with the model of government that is going to be set up in powerful capitalist countries in the light of the new order. This model can be defined by two characteristics: a state that is privatised and a democracy that is bought.
From the president, his vice president, defence minister and his deputy, to the prosecutor general, the head of the national security council, the CIA chief and even the president’s special representative on Afghanistan are all former directors and present commissioners of world corporations. They are on the list of major shareholders or on the payroll of Unocal, Chevron, Enron or Citybank, Lockheed etc….
This administration is meant to create a security umbrella for the large companies in the sanctuary of which creative accountants can transform years of loss into profit and soak up small and large savings in return for inflated share prices. At the cost of plundering the savings accounts of workers, managers fill their own pockets and provide the finds for elections.
This administration is a rubber stamp. It is there to proclaim the internal and foreign policies dictated by the directors of large corporations and to provide funds from public sources for those projects these corporations find profitable. Those who carry the costs, such generous companies as Enron, will also determine the fate of the elections and the parliamentary system.
At the other end of the global order, in countries such as Afghanistan, the government in keeping with the “new world order” is the obverse of the US administration, though not necessarily with a different logic. From the perspective of the “new order” there are two decisive elements in these countries:
First is large deposits of oil and gas under the ground or next door. For this reason they enter the sanctuary of “vital interests” of world capital, and their political system becomes part of the “general conditions” that is required to ensure the extensive reproduction of capital.
The second is their cultural “backwardness” and its political corollary, “irresponsible”, “rebel” or “rogue” governments. In such conditions global capital does not have a reliable political weapons in its possession to control the way oil and gas deposits are exploited, how much is marketed nor ultimately the share of “rent” in the sale price of the product. For the political-ideological circles in power in the White House, the ultimate means is to remove the “oil rent” – read oil and gas wells – from the realm of national sovereignty and place them under the “protectorate” of the sovereignty of global capital and its political command centre which is currently sitting in the Pentagon.
Therefore the appropriate “government” in countries like Afghanistan, with Iran and Iraq on top of the next list, is the government of “governors” or “guardians” [SARPARASTAN]. The people will exchange the tutelage of “guardians” with or without the turban for governors appointed by the White House. The British historian Paul Johnson made this point unambiguously when he wrote in the wall Street Journal that the solution for countries such as Afghanistan is to “find a responsible guardian by the big civilised powers” [26]. How this guardian [sarparast] is chosen would vary with the country. But what seems to be more or less clear is that in countries whose political conditions resemble Afghanistan a military solution is the preferred option.
Those countries “fortunate” enough to have the military option chosen for them to impose the “responsible sarparasti” the people will have the misfortune to experience the fate of Argentina and Afghanistan all in one go and simultaneously. Economic and physical ruin will be theirs at a stroke, so to speak. From the viewpoint of the Pentagon strategist the people of countries such as Afghanistan, and presumably Iran and Iraq, would not be even be given the options offered to such people as the Serbs..
In these countries the appointed guardians SARPARASTS have little function beyond security. While it may not easy to estimate the damage caused by the war– the post war aid package is unlikely to exceed the price of a B-52 bomber. Of course the “guardians sarparasts” can be allowed to close their eyes for a while on arms dealings or the heroin pipeline –the solution to the problems caused by addiction and smuggling have no urgency.
But where it comes to cultural values, they will not be asked to interfere in any meaningful way. For example they are not expected to remove the control of sharia laws on the system of punishment. They are not asked to stop the whipping, the stoning to death and the hanging from lamp posts. The supreme religious judge [Gazi Askar] of Afghanistan says that at best changes in penalties will be limited to using smaller stones when stoning and shortening the time a hanged person stays on the lamp post. [27]
But is the world that globalised capital has in mind for us a historic inevitability? Is he or she moving in a one way historic road from “ashes to ashes” [28] and from wretchedness to barbarism? Are people of countries like Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq doomed to suffer the closed circuit of protectorate and guardianship?? sarparasti of internal and external powers, as well as poverty and increasing misery? Or is there another choice for modern humankind.
Over seventy thousand people from 140 countries who met in the Global Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil last February said no to these questions. Another world is possible – they said in unison.
September 11 initiated a series of negative developments, but was not the end of the world. Alongside providing prospects for the most rabid tendencies in capitalism, it provides a historic opportunity for the rapacious nature and inhuman essence of capital to be exposed. There is a chance for illusions that have blindfolded the people of the world to be shed. The will of contemporary humankind to tackle the roots of the calamities and destitution will be strengthened and bring him and her on the scene for building a new world.
The Enron scandal, the collapse of Argentina and the Afghanistan war while showing the road for the restructuring of capital and its political and social consequences as well as its potential for reproduction, also point to its internal instability, the unreinability of its inner contradictions and the explosive nature of its crises.
To have nuclear weapons has the advantage of giving you life and death control over peoples’ lives. But this advantage fades when faced with suicide terrorism, and might even have the opposite effect. There it not much you can do with bombs and rockets when the sound of banging of empty pots and pans is heard across the world. Armed purely with military power, a government that thanks to globalisation has lost the power to make laws and control money, can only be a government of prison guards. Thus even while capital has strengthened its grip on labour it is not invulnerable. There are many tendons in this Achilles we can target.
Cracks and splits within the capitalist camp and the miracle of rival countries cannot be relied upon. The intertwining of their interests and their political viewpoints should alert us not to seriously rely on this in the existing balance of power. In the most optimistic scenario they will only grab at each others’ throat when global capital is seriously threatened from below.
Frustrated violence and blind hatred is equally impotent. A group who are ready to sacrifice their lives can here and there cause havoc and even scratch the corpus of this monster. Or massacre Christians, Hindus, Muslims, or plan gas chambers for Jews. None of these will even create the conditions for bringing unto its knees the power of global capital. All they will succeed in doing is to destroy the transnational ability to confront it, and in the process pulverise the labour camp and in certain conditions even relieve capital from junctural difficulties. As Susan George put it in order to stand up to capital there is no choice but to “accept the risk of being serious in this historic juncture” and understand the huge power of hope and solidarity.
A global problem requires a global solution. You cannot fight a monster whose limbs stretch from one continent to another and hundreds of governments, armies, information and police services, and thousands of private firms form its joints in single handed combat or local campaigns. In the first instance it is impossible to stand up to the Bush administration and its military, economic and even ideological power without the people of the USA and in front of them the working class of the country joining the global war against capitalism. In the war against the globalisation of capital one cannot look to victory without bringing into the battle against capital those who are imprisoned in the forced labour camps of corporations (from California to Mexico and Indonesia to Japan, Russia and China) creating a united camp. And have gathered beside them the unemployed, the domestic workers, the old, the young and the women among the poor.
It is impossible to see or build such a camp wearing third world, nationalist, ethnic, religious, and gender spectacles.
But the issue is not just the war against capital. Organisation is another issue. A shapeless mass can be brought into the streets in an uprising. But you cannot forward a “permanent war” a “long war” with it. Nor can you order it to organise from above. A collective existence that is formed through individual empowerment boils up from the depths. It relies on millions of “organic” political activist and organiser that are linked in a global network. This is a process that is dependent on a rejection of a authoritarian view of organisation and is in desperate need of the untiring power of creativity and dogged perseverance.
We also desperately need a global effort to present examples and models of the alternative alongside the global battle against the kind of world the capitalist are in the process of creating. From the experience of the Zapatistas in Mexico to the landless peasants on Brazil, of the people of Porto Alegre in running their city and their creation of a “participatory budget”, of the Indian knitting women, the Bangladeshi poor in setting up a peoples bank, the unemployed workers in Argentina, opposition to the Narmada valley dam project in India, and countless others one can find elements that contain the alternative world. A world that is more humane, more just more free.
Those who extracts the “alternative world” from purely ideological abstraction or particular philosophical deductions are incapable of understanding the true ability of humans and their terrestrial needs in its global extent. Those with such vision cannot imagine the real and achievable features of the alternative world.
The people of the world have a more powerful weapon to put up against nuclear weapons: to disobey, defy, challenge, and boycott the new world order where it relates to the relationship between states. This can be imposed.
While most existing governments can be pressured and forced to comply with the will of the forces that rule the world of capitalism, their people cannot be made to accede that easily. On the contrary, by civil disobedience the new world order can be overthrown where it relates to social relations [these last two sentences do not make sence – how do we get from relations between states to social relations?].
This enormous power was demonstrated last February by the people, the workers, the women and unemployed of Argentina. No national or global financial, military or political force could prevent the collapse of two presidents in less than two weeks. The boycott of material and cultural products, when done on a global scale, is back breaking. The campaigns to boycott transnational capital, even when its application was relatively limited, made many companies retreat immediately. Gap, Nike, McDonald, Citigroup, Chevron, had to agree to reappraise their policies and projects. We need to recognise the huge potential hidden in the global boycott tactic and evaluate the ways it can be harnessed into a major tool.
Finally Iran and Iraq which are in the forefront of the neo-liberal globalisation plans. There are two dangers here: one ids to give way and to become a tool and agency of the interfering powers. The other is to go under the umbrella of one’s own government and accede to their abomination, despotism and aggression. There is no doubt that, in the short term, redoubling our effort to overthrow ones own government will remove the detonator from an imperialist intervention. But if this overthrow does not result in the popular sovereignty and self government and the immediate establishment of individual and social rights, then no power can prevent the ultimate tragedy that awaits these countries.
In Iran the continuation of the despotic system, under whatever name and relying on whatever power can result in the break-up of the country. The accumulated friction and social crisis in Iran have become so intense that unless they are reined in through social and political liberation, the country cannot escape social and political ruination. To fan the flames of national and ethnic frictions will not upset global capital, nor prevent it from finding the necessary tools from these tensions to build the political order it desires.
We cannot use the danger posed by imperialist intervention to excuse the continued existence of religious despotism in Iran. Each day this regime survives the costs have to be born through months and years of pain and hardship. The longer this cancer remains in our social body, the more the call of the global powers to operate will appear more justified and its consequences more painful.
The people of Iran cannot gain social and political liberation in isolation. Neither can they gain anything by surrendering to global corporativism and its global political order. That would be to vote for the continuation of their slavery, by other means, but one that is deeper, and historically speaking, with worse consequence than they have experienced to date.
The Iranian people have still not seen real structural readjustment, or experienced radical economic reforms. There is still much wealth to be plundered in our country. The labour force has still not had the heavy load of loans added to the heavy burden of poverty. Those who in the Pentagon draw lines round the map of Iran, are not just planning the sale of our oil and gas deposits. They are already pre-selling the labour power of our people for many years to come.
Neither monarchy nor martyrdom will give our people its sovereignty and national identity. Nothing lass than a broad anti-capitalist, and anti-dictatorial and deeply democratic and outward looking movement can save our people from the “world they are building for them”. Such a movement is more than at any time a matter of life and death. The left must fight to the death if necessary to create this movement.
March 15, 2002
1. Estvan Meszaros, Socialism or Barbarism …
2. The severe shocks in the Far East, Russia, Mexico and most recently Argentina have barely settled when Japan is struggling with the pre-shocks of an explosive crisis.
3. Since Seattle the IMF, World Bank and WTO have faced a storm of criticism and protest. They are being portrayed in slogans as the “axis of evil”
4. There has been a huge leap in strikes and protest across the world – see Ardeshir Mehrdad: The anti-capitalist movement after Genoa – iran bulletin – www.Iran-bulletin.org – new articles
5. See James Caroll: A build up in search of an enemy. The Boston Globe, February 5, 2002.
6. Edward S Herman et al. Mirror, Mirror on the Wall; Who is the Biggest Rogue of All?. The Philadelphia Enquirer, February 25, 2002.
7. See Michael Roberts: A global Steel War. http://www.marxist.com.
8. Ibid
9. John Pilger The Colder War, Mirror. January 29, 2002.
10. Guardian. February 9, 2000????
11. See the interesting article by Ranjit Devraj, The oil behind the Bush and Son’s campaign. Asia Times on Line, October 6, 2001. Among those implicated are Dick Cheney, Ashcroft, Codoleezza Rice, George Bush (father and son) James Baker, and many more.
12. Ibid
13. Edward S Herman ibid
14. Declare a war on war. Chennais India, March 5, 2002
15. John Pilger, The Colder war ibid
16. Pilger ibid
17. Pentagon in a League of its Own. International Herald Tribune, February 3, 2002
18. Pilger ibid
19. Depleted Uranium in Bunker Bombs. Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2002
20. Paul Kennedy. Has the US lost its Way. The Observer.
21. Pilger ibid
22. William M Arkin. US bases face Double Edge Sword. Times Special Correspondent, January 6, 2002. From Sez to Pacific. The Guardian, March 8, 2002.
23. Interactivist Info Exchange, March 7, 2002. www:autonomedia.org
24. Twin Debacle of Free Market. DAWN, February 23, 2002. Declaration of ATTAC. Argentina, 20.12.2001. Eduardo Galeano, Argentina, Obedient Victim. www.autonomedia.com
25. Pope Escobar. The new Imperialism. Independent Media and Analysis (on line) November 17, 2001. A similar point was made by Blair’s foreign policy adviser Robert Cooper who suggested that “when operating in a jungle we must use the laws of the jungle” and therefore “what is needed is a new kind of imperialism, one compatible with human rights”. Observer, April 7 2002. www.observer.co.uk/worldview
26. ibid
27. Pilger ibid
28. A reference to Harold Pinter’s new play